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From: KEN@ORION.BITNET (Kenneth Ng)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.misc,comp.software-eng
Subject: Re: Software Technology is NOT Primitive
Message-ID: <36KEN@ORION>
Date: Sun, 25-Oct-87 13:55:02 EST
Article-I.D.: ORION.36KEN
Posted: Sun Oct 25 13:55:02 1987
Date-Received: Tue, 27-Oct-87 06:02:19 EST
Organization: New Jersey Institute of Technology
Lines: 23
Xref: mnetor comp.lang.misc:789 comp.software-eng:6

>In 1950, a
>processor had a control unit, a few registers and an ALU while a program had a
>simple routine to read cards, a simple routine to drive the printer, and a
>simple core algorithm.  Today, a processor had a control unit, a few registers
>and an ALU (note the less than radical change), while a program has a graphics
>interface, a file manager, a recovery scheme and a performance monitor in
>addition to the core algorithm.  There has been quite a deal of change in the
>tools and _functional_ capabilities of software systems.
>
Shouldn't you be taking the software program as a whole and the hardware
as a whole?  Saying the hardware today is just an ALU, registers and
memory is like saying all of today's software is an assignment, compare
and branch statement.  To compare your description of software today to
hardware today, try adding LRU caching, address lookaside buffers,
I/O processors, massive error detection and correction logic, ethernet
and other communication technology, paging, the entire virtual memory
schemes on a lot of machines, etc., etc, etc.
>  Lawrence Crowl                716-275-9499    University of Rochester
     
Kenneth Ng: ken@orion.bitnet